Tales of the unexpected: The best new literary reads

ENGROSS yourself in two novels that earn full marks.

Exposure by Helen Dunmore (Hutchinson, £16.99)

There is a moment towards the beginning of Exposure in which one of the characters, realising that he is not the young man he once was, contemplates the question of self-perception and concludes: “We aren’t meant to see ourselves as others see us.”

It is a theme that infuses Helen Dunmore’s 14th adult novel, an intricately observed and emotionally powerful Cold War thriller that combines subtlety and complexity to create a deeply satisfying and moving book.

Lily Callington is happily married with three children, living in the leafy north London suburb of Muswell Hill. The novel opens in 1960, two decades after Lily and her Jewish mother escaped Nazi Germany. Lily’s husband Simon works for an arm of the British Government, the Admiralty, and Lily is under no illusions about the covert nature of his work.

But then one evening, a colleague and long-standing friend of Simon’s, Giles Holloway, calls from his hospital bed and asks Simon to collect a file from his flat and return it to the office.

A sequence of events is set in motion that lead to Simon’s arrest, Lily’s flight with the children from London and revelations of love affairs, espionage and murder.

The brilliance of Exposure lies in the emotional insight and depth that Dunmore brings to the spy novel genre.

The characters are skilfully drawn and by narrating the novel from the alternating perspectives of Lily, Simon and Giles, Dunmore brings layers of psychological understanding and empathy to the story, even managing to raise the reader’s sympathy for reptilian Giles towards the end.

Lily is the novel’s undoubted heroine and one of the most compelling literary creations of recent years. Stoical, fiercely independent and full of guile, she is ultimately more clever than all the men who underestimate and seek to belittle her. In this masculine world of secrets, lies, intimidation and bullying, Lily’s is a voice we rarely hear in fiction.

Repeated refrains throughout the novel add to the sense of urgency and of history repeating itself. The sound of trains permeate characters’ thoughts; although a train provided Lily’s escape from Berlin, Dunmore’s characters spend much of the novel unaware of what they need to escape from.

There is the theme of absent fathers: Lily’s father abandoned his wife and daughter to their fate in pre-war Germany and Simon inadvertently abandons his children when arrested. And throughout, Lily repeats her belief that having escaped the Nazis, she has found safety in the UK: “This is England… Nothing bad will happen to you here.”

The result is a masterful piece of storytelling about memory, betrayal, trust and self-awareness. As Simon Callington pronounces in the opening line of the novel: “It isn’t what you know or don’t know; it’s what you allow yourself to know.”

VERDICT: 5/5

Hannah Beckerman

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The Noise Of Time by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape, £14.99)

Writing novels about real people is a presumptuous business. What right has the novelist to assert what so-and-so felt or thought about this or that? But the paradox is that a novel, for all its guesswork, can often feel truer than a biography that sticks dutifully to the known facts.

This is certainly the case with the works of Julian Barnes. His novel Arthur & George, about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, makes the creator of Sherlock Holmes live and breathe on the page. Doyle, the master storyteller, would perhaps have appreciated that as the ultimate tribute even if he might have disapproved of some of Barnes’ imaginative flights.

And his offbeat novel Flaubert’s Parrot surely offers more insight into the author of Madame Bovary than a dozen conventional biographies.

Barnes’ new novel The Noise Of Time is about the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. It begins in 1936 when Joseph Stalin was eliminating artists and musicians in huge numbers. Shostakovich, expecting imminent arrest, waits every night by the lift door of his apartment block to spare his wife and daughter the ordeal of watching him being taken away.

His crime is to have composed eccentric, experimental music at a time when the state expected artists to produce work that they thought the masses would enjoy.

Shostakovich may not have been arrested, but Barnes’ novel shows how he lived in fear until Stalin died in 1953.

The last part of the book finds him in the 1960s and 70s during the comparatively benign regimes of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, aware that he is no longer in danger of losing his life if his works displease the state but struggling to summon up the will to write original work after decades of artistic compromise.

Like his contemporary Martin Amis, Barnes made his name with exuberant satires. In recent years, Amis has turned to tackling big, serious subjects such as the Holocaust, and it looks like Barnes has decided to join in.

But this is recognisably a Barnes novel, full of playful wit and understatement. There is no melodrama here, simply an attempt to show the workings of a brilliant, civilised mind and the effect on that mind of living in a country presided over by psychopathic philistines.

Like his previous novel,the Man Booker-winning The Sense Of An Ending, this is a very short book but it contains more to enjoy and chew over than most novels three times its length.

Only a novelist could show us what it was like not just to know a real person but to be inside that person’s head, and it seems especially important to do this with somebody like Shostakovich who had the misfortune to live under circumstances in which his voice could not be truly heard.

VERDICT: 5/5

Jake Kerridge

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Tales of the unexpected

UNSETTLING secrets, murky mystery and sassy life advice – Eithne Farry’s favourite new literary reads are full of surprises.

The Trouble With Goats And Sheep by Joanna Cannon(The Borough Press, £12.99)

It’s the long, hot summer of 1976 and The Avenue is sticky with secrets. Mrs Creasy has vanished and old hatreds, faltering friendships and mistaken assumptions simmer in the wake of her disappearance.

Ten-year-old best friends Grace and Tilly are on a mission to discover the whereabouts of God while also hoping to find the missing woman. Fresh and vivid, this intriguing debut is a perceptive coming-of-age tale. (Read Joanna’s exclusive short story on page 55.)

American Housewife by Helen Ellis(Scribner, £12.99)

Helen Ellis’s electric short stories are whip-smart and sparky, crackling with dark humour and the kind of unruly thinking that can get a woman in and out of all kinds of trouble.

There is advice on how to live a gracious life, how to cope with plenitude (“I weep because I am lucky enough to have a drawer just for glitter”), suggestions for making friends while starring in a reality TV show and cheerful insights into disposing of a murdered body.

The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie (4th Estate, £12.99)

Veblen Amundsen-Hovda is “in the slim green spring of her life” – she has hope in her wistful heart, a penchant for dapper squirrels and a determination to seek out the best in difficult situations – yet she’s having doubts about her engagement to her neurologist fiancé.

The ring is wrong, his job is murky and both sets of parents are providing their own idiosyncratic difficulties in this touching, wildly funny and peculiarly elegant look at the travails of love of all kinds.

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Dinosaurs On Other Planets by Danielle McLaughlin (John Murray, £14.99)

Danielle McLaughlin’s stories are beautifully strange and unsettling. Upending ordinary domestic life and shaking out untoward emotions, dark secrets and latent violence, they reveal the shadowy truths that lurk beneath work journeys, marriages and the parent-child bond.

The stories are littered with bluebottles, dead birds, fish and the soft mouldering of insects but the characters are vital and watchful, attempting to make sense of a world that seems determined to scupper their best intentions and to realise their worst fears.

Mr Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt (Corsair, £16.99)

Religious cult leaders, orphans with a knack for talking to the dead and a slick con man are just some of the off-kilter characters that make up the cast of Hunt’s poetic and atmospheric Gothic novel.

Cora is bored and unexpectedly pregnant when a surprise visit from her silent aunt Ruth offers a strange solution to her unease. The pair then take to the roads of New York State on a footsore journey that will delve into Ruth’s past and transform Cora’s future.